Real time radiosity through parallel processing and hardware acceleration

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Abstract
This paper describes a novel implementation of the progressive refinement radiosity algorithm. Algorithm performance is greatly enhanced using the capabilities of a multiprocessor graphics workstation. Hemi-cube item buffers are produced using the graphics hardware while the remaining computations are performed in parallel on the multiple host processors. Speedups of a factor of 40 or more over the equivalent software implementation are observed. Load balancing issues are discussed and a system performance model is developed based on actual results.Additionally, a new user interface scheme is presented where the radiosity calculations and walk-through tasks are separated. At each new iteration, the radiosity algorithm automatically updates colors used by the viewing program via shared memory while simultaneously obtaining hints on where to further refine the solution.

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